‘We prepare for the wrong disasters’: Earth’s fight against encroaching saltwater.
From The Gambia to the US, sea salt is increasingly seeping into the freshwaters people need for drinking and producing food.
Someone turns on the tap for drinking water in New Orleans, but the water is salty. In Bangladesh, farmers are forced to turn previously fertile land into brackish ponds to raise shrimp. In The Gambia, a farmer watches her crops wither and fail, doused in salt.
Around the world, previously reliable coastal freshwater supplies are turning to salt, invaded by seawater. This is the strange, slow-moving crisis of saltwater intrusion, and it is increasingly affecting communities around the world.
